Related papers: Environmental Information Improves Robotic Search …
Autonomous exploration in mobile robotics often involves a trade-off between two objectives: maximizing environmental coverage and minimizing the total path length. In the widely used information gain paradigm, exploration is guided by the…
Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…
We study the performance of infotaxis search strategy measured by the rate of success and mean search time, under changes in the environment parameters such as diffusivity, rate of emission or wind velocity. We also investigate the drop of…
Autonomous robots for gathering information on objects of interest has numerous real-world applications because of they improve efficiency, performance and safety. Realizing autonomy demands online planning algorithms to solve sequential…
This paper addresses an autonomous exploration problem in which a mobile sensor, placed in a previously unseen search area, utilizes an information-theoretic navigation cost function to dynamically select the next sensing action, i.e.,…
Adaptive sampling and planning in robotic environmental monitoring are challenging when the target environmental process varies over space and time. The underlying environmental dynamics require the planning module to integrate future…
Robots can be used to collect environmental data in regions that are difficult for humans to traverse. However, limitations remain in the size of region that a robot can directly observe per unit time. We introduce a method for selecting a…
We revisit the linear search problem where a robot, initially placed at the origin on an infinite line, tries to locate a stationary target placed at an unknown position on the line. Unlike previous studies, in which the robot travels along…
Effective communication is crucial for deploying robots in mission-specific tasks, but inadequate or unreliable communication can greatly reduce mission efficacy, for example in search and rescue missions where communication-denied…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the obvious influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing improved environment…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
In this article, we propose a sampling-based motion planning algorithm equipped with an information-theoretic convergence criterion for incremental informative motion planning. The proposed approach allows dense map representations and…
Recent research in robot exploration and mapping has focused on sampling environmental hotspot fields. This exploration task is formalized by Low, Dolan, and Khosla (2008) in a sequential decision-theoretic planning under uncertainty…
We improve reliable, long-horizon, goal-directed navigation in partially-mapped environments by using non-locally available information to predict the goodness of temporally-extended actions that enter unseen space. Making predictions about…
In this paper, we study the well-known team orienteering problem where a fleet of robots collects rewards by visiting locations. Usually, the rewards are assumed to be known to the robots; however, in applications such as environmental…
This paper considers the problem of planning trajectories for a team of sensor-equipped robots to reduce uncertainty about a dynamical process. Optimizing the trade-off between information gain and energy cost (e.g., control effort,…
We investigate the autonomous navigation of a mobile robot in the presence of other moving vehicles under time-varying uncertain environmental disturbances. We first predict the future state distributions of other vehicles to account for…
Assume that a target is known to be present at an unknown point among a finite set of locations in the plane. We search for it using a mobile robot that has imperfect sensing capabilities. It takes time for the robot to move between…
Consider a target moving at a constant velocity on a unit-circumference circle, starting at an arbitrary location. To acquire the target, any region of the circle can be probed to obtain a noisy measurement of the target's presence, where…
A key problem of robotic environmental sensing and monitoring is that of active sensing: How can a team of robots plan the most informative observation paths to minimize the uncertainty in modeling and predicting an environmental…